Mary Kay Andrews Quotes

I've tried everywhere, but my garden shed is the most effective place to write.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.

Brooklyn is kind of my writer's retreat.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.

Everything I have ever written has been in the same chair, in the same room.

Real writers - serious writers with serious subjects, who earn their living at it - all seem to write in small rooms with that knotty-pine 1974 look on the top-floor rear of their houses. Rooms with views.

When I was a kid, I loved 'Little Women.'

I wish one time in my life I could do what other writers do... get me a villa in Spain and go there to write a book.

Having my own studio at home is a dream, as I have a totally sound-proof room I can escape to when I need to write, and I have an impeccable room to record in.

It's hard to describe why one room and not another feels right for writing. Of course you have to train yourself to be able to write anywhere, but it's nice to feel that each book has a place that belongs to it, where it's home.

When I was young, I really identified with Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, particularly the character of Jo. The book was written at a time when there weren't as many options for women and girls as there are now. Jo really struggled with that. She wanted to write, to work, to help her family.

It's one of the reasons I became a writer, to be able to smoke in peace.

I like being at home with my music and my books. I’ve done all the partying, I’ve done enough partying for four or five people as a young fella. But now I like the quiet life.

I love writing. I'm not particularly comfortable in the actual world - I'm much more comfortable on the page. So if I could have a life where I could just slip the pages under the door and somebody would slip me a meal back, then that would be perfect for me.

Oh, why can't we break away from all this, just you and I, and lodge with my fleas in the hills? I mean flee to my lodge in the hills.

I took a great deal of pleasure in it, and I still feel nostalgic about it. However, I felt that it had led me to live in a parallel world of pure invention, shut inside my solitude. Naturally, it was precisely for that purpose that it was made and that was why I took pleasure in it, but I wanted to regain body and roots.

I feel like I live in my own little world, to be honest. I mean, I love my record, but I don't feel tied to it. I sort of created my own little universe in the studio, and that's why all of those musicians who made a living in the Nashville music scene loved coming over to my place so much.

England offers new comforts. I could write a novel there.

The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even during the day with covers pulled up to my chin. It was good in there, nothing ever occurred in there, no people, nothing.

Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends.

Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.

I wanted to find a place to hide from all of it, where the nightmares and the rivers and reality couldn't find me. For me, that place was always inside a book.

As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.

In the evening I go up in the desert and spend hours watching the sun go down, just enjoying it, and every day I go out and watch it again. I draw some and there is a little painting and so the days go by.